Planetary by Bloom Studio literally turns your music library into a virtual galaxy of bright suns, planets, and moons. The hierarchy is broken down into the grouping of artists with the same beginning letter contained in a galaxy, solar systems represent artists with the sun being identified as the artist’s name, planets are album names, and the number of moons per planet equals the number of tracks per album.

Exploring your music library is as simple as tapping on the astronomical objects. The environments can be zoomed in and out using two fingers, and panned with a swipe or flick of a single finger. Moving outward, say from a planet zoom level to a solar system zoom level, takes only an un-pinch motion. Song information is shown in the bottom-left, whereas the basic controls are available in the bottom-right.

Daniel Terdiman of CNET sat down with Bloom’s president Ben Cerveny for a more in-depth interview about the launch of their newest application.

Planetary is compatible with iPad running iOS 4.0 or later, and available in the App Store as a free download.

Bloom is focused on creating pop-cultural instruments for data expression and exploration. The people behind it are Ben Cerveny and Tom Carden, prior Stamen employees, Jesper Sparre Andersen and Robert Hodgin aka Flight404, co-founder of The Barbarian Group.

Subscribe for more

Related articles

Give Feedback

Although not the best music player, Planetary is a wonderful piece of interactive data visualization. I think it is one of the pieces out there that demonstrate to us the future of the graphic user experience, where interfaces will not only be driven by aesthetics, but also by data. Despite how much we at are attracted to aesthetics, we are rapidly becoming a culture also driven by data. The meeting point of relevant data and effective aesthetics is the likely future for user interfaces and the user experience.